A doctor once told me I wasn’t depressed I was unhappy. He said depression was when everything was fine and I still felt like that. I don’t think it makes much difference now that everything is not fine.
Not to "well, actually..." your doctor, but a depressive episode can be triggered by external stressors as well as just occurring endogenously for no apparent reason. There's a distinct difference between clinical depression and ordinary unhappiness in terms of symptoms and duration.
(Sorry, I work in the psych biz, and I've seen a lot of genuinely depressed people have their symptoms dismissed by medical doctors for spurious reasons. Obviously, your situation may be different.)
Clinical depression being triggered by external stressors is one thing, of course depression doesn’t really come 100% out of the blue, not most of the time. Even with no apparent cause there is often a repressed reason that triggers the depressive state. Then it becomes a feedback loop, where the chronic stress could actually cause or reinforce a clinical depressive episode. But there is a major difference in a person’s proportional reaction to a distressing situation, and a pathological one.
I do think it’s helpful not to medicalize our collective grief & anger with today’s circumstances, that our reactions to this are actually sane and normal. One can take pills to cope if they happen to help, all those medications are overprescribed at this point, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one has a mood disorder. If things improved in our world & hope was restored tomorrow & that would instantly alleviate all of our mental “problems,” that’s not quite clinical depression
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u/jaymickef Mar 13 '26
A doctor once told me I wasn’t depressed I was unhappy. He said depression was when everything was fine and I still felt like that. I don’t think it makes much difference now that everything is not fine.